Oscar Goes to ... Duke Nukem?

Brad King
03.29.01

Gaming isn't just for, well, gaming anymore. Now more than ever, video games are leaving the confines of the PC and game consoles and winding up on the big screen.

Last week, Duke Nukem joined its brethren as the latest video game to be headed for the big screen when Dimension Film green-lighted the project. Duke will follow on the footsteps of Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy, successful gaming franchises that each have a movie premiering this year.

Increasingly, movie companies can be expected to look to game makers as a source for their ideas. This is for good reason: Many games come with a built-in audience. Dimension Films knows more than anybody that Duke Nukem has already generated $1 billion in gaming sales.

"You can't just make a movie anymore in this environment, you have to make a multimedia event," said Larry Kasanoff, CEO of thethreshold.com. "You have to make your intellectual property into all the ways that people can consume that entertainment. Duke will be a movie at first, but it will also be a cartoon, a record. That's what being a producer means today."

Kasanoff has built his entire business around taking successful franchises and turning them into multimedia events. Threshold Entertainment is the production company that develops movie projects such as the wildly successful Mortal Kombat movies.

Meanwhile, Threshold's website builds interactive communities around video game and comic book characters, as well as popular figures such as Reno Mero -- a k a Sable, formerly of the World Wrestling Federation.

If Kasanoff is looking for someone to thank for the influx of ideas, he and his movie studio pals need look no further than the hardware industry.

Over the last two years, high-powered game consoles have hit the marketplace, and The Yankee Group predicts that 45 million households will have some sort of gaming console by 2004. With increased computing power and Internet-connected consoles, game designers have the ability to create complex worlds that came closer to resembling reality.